The Plum Trees: A Novel

by Victoria Shorr

Synopsis

A poignant tale about one woman's quest to recover her family's history, and a story of loss and survival during the Holocaust.

Consie is home for a funeral when she stumbles upon a family letter sent from Germany in 1945, which contains staggering news: Consie's great-uncle Hermann, who was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and three daughters, might have escaped. This seems improbable to Consie. Did people escape from Auschwitz? Could her great-uncle have been among them? What happened to Hermann? Did anyone know? These questions are at the root of Consie's excavation of her family's history as she seeks, seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, to discover what happened to Hermann.

The Plum Trees follows Consie as she draws on oral testimonies, historical records, and more to construct a visceral account of the lives of Hermann, his wife, and their daughters from the happy days in prewar Czechoslovakia through their internment in Auschwitz and the end of World War II. The Plum Trees is a powerful, intimate reckoning with the past.

Release date: March 9, 2021

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Print pages: 269

Sample

1

“SOMETHING TO DRINK?” asked the bartender.

Gin, Consie was thinking, or maybe something warming, since it was cold, and not just cold, but Ohio cold. Bleak midwinter, though not even Thanksgiving yet, with all the rest to go.

“Bourbon,” she said.

But “No bourbon,” said the bartender.

Fine, what did they drink here? She tried to remember the bottles from when they were children. Canadian something? Seven and seven—what was the seven? Schenley’s? It didn’t matter. “Whatever you’ve got,” she said.

But it turned out there was no liquor at all here, not even old-lady sherry. Her aunt didn’t think alcohol was appropriate for a funeral.

But when was it more appropriate? She wanted to slug someone. And deconstructing the thing, what wasappropriate for a funeral? Bitters? Dirty water? Lukewarm tea?

And what about all the little cakes then, the sweets, the sandwiches they were passing? If they were to mourn, then let them bring out the ashes, cover the mirrors, tear their clothes. They had just put her oldest uncle in the ground. The worms whose dirt he’d taken would just be thinking about moving back in.

Unless they were frozen. It was sleeting outside, not even snowing. At the cemetery, they’d been hit in the face with freezing rain. It had been grim, blowing, and the trees stood stark and lonely.

She had tried to get here before he died; she’d wanted to get here. When she got the call that he was failing, she’d booked the first flight out, cost be damned, since weren’t distances supposed to be nothing in this postmodern world? And compared to the old days, what was a five-hour flight across the country?

But in the end, it proved too much, the same too much as two hundred years ago, when the news would have come months late, by tattered letter, rather than over the phone in real time. Though two hundred years ago, she wouldn’t have lived in California, or even 

survived childbirth for that matter, and if she had, then the Spanish flu would have gotten her by now, or whatever people died from. She too would be lying out there, under the sleet and the freezing rain.

She walked over to the window and looked out over what was left of the trees. Melville had once called the woods around here “the holy of holies,” but they’d been despoiled long ago in the service of an industry that hadn’t held up either, and now they were both gone, the forests and the mills. In their place was this remnant of some third-growth wetland, turned by recent development into another outpost of Nowhere, complete with the usual mall.

“Dust to dust”—had they said that at the funeral? She didn’t remember hearing it. Maybe it wasn’t part of this particular drill, maybe its clear-eyed assessment was considered somewhat harsh. They’d stood instead for the Twenty-Third Psalm, but wasn’t that a young man’s song, victorious in God’s good graces? Walking through “the valley of the shadow of death,” fearing no evil—but what did that have to do with her uncle?

He was ashes, dust. “Worms’ meat,” as Shakespeare put it. “Gone.” “Passed away,” “Passed”—when did people start saying that? And what good was it supposed to do? Make it all sound light, like a guru on his way to life as a butterfly?

Her uncle had been a father to her for most of her life. She’d loved him. She took a deep breath. Her head was already starting to hurt, but just then a cousin appeared with a flask, which, when poured into her paper cup, did wonders for the ginger ale.

“The good stuff,” he muttered. “Too bad we have to mix it.”

Not that there was anything the matter with bourbon and ginger. Consie drank—and then again. She’d made a mistake at the cemetery, one of those confoundings that have a name in the philosophy she used to study with such excitement, such belief, in college. When you mistake the whole for one of its parts; or was it the opposite? Anyway, the point here was that she’d wanted to see her uncle one more time, so that when a man in black asked if she’d like to “view the deceased,” she’d said yes.

Wherein lay the flaw, because what she’d wanted was one more glimpse of her uncle alive, the pink cheeks and lovely gray eyes that had from her earliest days graced her world. But what she’d gotten was her uncle’s hair cut a way he’d have never abided, and his pink cheeks a strange orange—self-tanner, she realized with horror. The undertaker having his way with a dead man.

After that, the rest of it had passed in a blur. There was a service during which they’d sat or stood as 

commanded, and then they filed out into the graveyard itself. She had grown up here, but had forgotten Ohio in the sleet, and the way the freezing rain hits you full in the face. There had been snow in the nice old neighborhood where they were staying, but here there was no snow, only half-frozen mud. As they lowered the coffin slowly, she’d wanted to cry out. Were they really going to leave him out here, in this cold, under the stark, leafless trees? What about waiting a day, or just till it snowed, which people said made a blanket. People who’d been caught out in what they called “the elements” and survived.

But there was no stopping any of it, the slow lowering of the coffin on some sort of machine these days, by Spanish-speaking workmen in jeans and hoodies, for what was this to them? Still, couldn’t there be some sort of uniform, couldn’t they at least be clad in black, out of respect?

And then, people stepped forward and threw shovels of dirt into the gaping hole on top of the coffin—how could they have done that to her uncle? And why? To make sure? But she was sure already. She had “viewed” him. Someone offered her a shovel, but she just shook her head.

THE APARTMENT WAS GETTING CROWDED. “We’re so sorry,” people were saying. Paying “condolences,” as they used to call it, maybe still do. They didn’t seem to have death like this in California, not normal death, that is, of old age, where nice people in wool gather to drink ginger ale and eat a cookie. There was instead sudden, shocking death of the young—a suicide, a crazy crash on Sunset. Where people afterwards aren’t drinking much of anything, just standing stunned and drugged amongst the teddy bears and flowers.

She took another drink and remembered a scene in Rilke—some half-crazed old aunt sitting at the table, having dinner with her dead. The strange thing being that it seemed less voodoo than custom, just life going on as it always had, the same places set with the same silver, the candles, the “Yes, please,” and “No, thank you,” only no one there.

Not a bad way to do it, all things considered, or even a few things considered, because what else was there? A world of sadness? Nothing but loss? Alcohol? And even with that, even if you went out there, crazed or drunk or tripping, could you ever hear their voices again, saying your name just the way they used to, which was what she realized she wanted? More than anything.

Her uncle saying her name, “Cons”—that, and some air. Some sleet, or maybe snow by now, in her face. She headed for the door. She’d left her scarf on 

the plane, and forgotten her boots altogether, but that was fine. The worse now, the better.

“So sorry about your uncle—” A woman took her arm. Had she met her before? She couldn’t quite place her. Foreign, but with one of those bad Cleveland haircuts. Long in the front, short in the back. Sassoon meets the Midwest.

“I helped your aunt go through his papers—”

Yes, yes. Was she a friend or secretary? Her aunt had come into the marriage with money of her own, so there was that possibility.

“Before the telephone,” the woman was saying, and “so many letters,” and so on. The point was to get away and outside. But the woman was going on, about something. Said she’d been so moved since she herself had come from there as well.

Yes, exactly—or from where? Whatever. It was getting darker. Consie wanted to, had to, get out, to catch the last of the light.

“So interesting,” said the woman.

Yes, in their way, interesting, her uncle’s letters—she’d seen some of them herself. The sweet formal notes to her aunt, asking her to dances. An account of hitchhiking home from college once, when he’d found himself in a small Ohio town at dusk, knocked on a random door, and was invited in for dinner and given a bed, as in the Greek myths or the Bible.

The past. Nice, but over. As opposed to the sleet outside, and the freezing air, which would fix her pounding head.

“Still, to read it now—” the woman was saying.

“Yes, amazing—” Consie could see the door, over the woman’s shoulder. Ten steps, but the woman had her arm.

“So you’ve read it?”

They exchanged a look.

“Since you’re a writer.”

Was she? Unpublished?

“Your uncle told me.”

Had he?

“He loved your stories. The ones about Brazil.”

Checkmate. Consie took a breath. “Read what?”

IT WAS SIX PAGES, single-spaced, from her uncle, dated “August 31, 1945. Biggin Hill, Kent, England.”

So—her uncle’s war. That part she knew. There was a photo of him on the coffee table when she was a child, in a kilt and tam-o’-shanter, with a nice smile. It looked like it had been fun for him there, in Merry England. He was twenty-five then, the war was over. She even remembered meeting some elderly Englishwomen who’d come to visit her grandmother, years ago. They’d befriended him over there, invited him to suppers and tea.

“Dear Mother and Dad,” it started, “This letter has been on my mind for a long time and now I am determined to write.”

An ominous tone for a salutation, though we all owe letters. Used to, when we wrote them, all of which we were “determined to write.” And sure enough, soon her uncle was talking about the weather. “Hot . . . terrible,” still, he was, “as always, glad to be back.”

In England, presumably. He mentions a side trip to Paris, where he went to a “semi-cabaret,” whatever that was, ate “iced tomatoes,” and “almost dropped through the floor” when an army buddy opened a bottle of “vine blanc,” as he wrote it.

“But,” he confessed, “we drank it!” And not only drank it but danced afterwards and listened to “another Yank” with a “trained voice” sing a few songs.

Funny, those old touches. The “semi-cabaret,” the dropping through the floor over white wine. The “trained voice”—did that mean church choir or Carnegie Hall? Either way, she would have liked to have been there for the dancing that night.

He went on to say he’d spent the night in Paris—he mentions “Villa Coublay,” which must have been somewhere posh, or formerly, since six years of war, which would have meant either Nazi occupation or hardly any coal and strictly rationed food, probably both, would have taken its toll on any villa—and the next morning arrived early for his plane. He did a little work for the army while he waited, “signed a few passengers through.” It sounded almost like fun.

But “So much for that.” Now he came to “the real purpose of this letter.” He had been “procrastinating,” he wrote. “But now that you expect the worst, I guess I can begin.”

SHE COULD ALMOST HEAR his voice here. The flight he was early for turned out to be to Frankfurt, which was as close as he could get to the town of Starnberg, in Germany, where there was a holding camp for “displaced persons,” as they were calling people who’d survived the Nazi death camps. He was seeking two girls, cousins, who he’d heard from someone—he doesn’t say who or how—might still be alive.

From Frankfurt, he hitched in his US Army uniform to Starnberg, about 150 miles, picked up by “any and every German car,” he wrote, which were on the road strictly with Allied permission, and afraid to “brown off” an American. The first car was a ’37 Buick, with a rich man and a driver; next came a small bus carrying “a GI and a German girl seeking work as an interpreter.” The driver was “the typical Nazi type,” and when her uncle mentioned that he was going to 

Feldafing, the DP camp, “the girl claimed innocence of the place, but the driver shut up like a clam.”

They rode to the town of Starnberg in uneasy silence, and then her uncle got a ride the few kilometers out to the camp in an ambulance. It was a lovely place that had been an elite Hitler Youth school, set in a group of charming villas with a view of the lake. Now it served as a sort of halfway house for about four thousand men, women, and children who’d somehow eluded the gas and the chimneys, and found themselves on the other side of the nightmare, blinking and, for the most part, alone.

Her uncle was let out at the gate. When he walked in, “everyone looked at me. I was a strange face and carrying a musette bag, and these poor people must have wondered what the devil I was doing there. I walked into the main building, and it was a rather depressing experience. For some silly reason, it had a peculiar odor.”

She looked up. What did people know, in August of 1945? Enough to make even Bavaria smell “peculiar”? Of human flesh?

And why “silly”? Still, it sounded somehow like her uncle, and she read on.

THERE WAS A “VERY NICE” Danish girl in charge. She looked in the register for the names he gave her, and told him the good news was the girls had been there; but since they’d come in “from Auswetz Camp,” as he wrote it, they were in need of medical care and had been taken over to a nearby sanitarium, at St. Ottilien. It was close by, and he could get there easily enough, but only in the morning. The roads around there were still deserted after dark. They would put him up for the night, the Dane said.

He was invited to share in the displaced persons’ dinner, in one of the men’s rooms—bread and butter, a bit of cheese. In his honor, they opened a tin of anchovies and another of tuna fish. “I felt like two cents taking it,” he wrote, “but I was hungry.” And so were they—there was a shocking paucity of food at the camp. These survivors, as they weren’t really called yet, were on nobody’s list. While the Nazi POWs were receiving the same food as American soldiers, “these poor people must exist on meager rations, and they are meager,” her uncle wrote.

As they were having their scant dinner, “Some of the neighbors came in, a few middle-aged women who really looked very nice. You might think it was a cottage and this was a vacation,” he wrote, “until they started talking.”

He had heard some of the stories coming out, and seen some of the first pictures, but “it doesn’t really strike you as thoroughly and completely as when 

you’re with these people.” It was one thing to see all the corpses and the living skeletons in black and white, but what of these “very nice-looking” young women, who found themselves alive somehow?

And how? They didn’t know, after what they’d seen—how had they lived? What did it mean, what could it mean? They didn’t know yet. In June of 1945, it seemed to mean that they were still half-starving, still in a camp, albeit a nice one. Not like the ones they had only recently departed, camps designed by the best engineers in all of Germany for the express purpose of killing them with the least amount of muss and fuss to their friends and neighbors.

Former friends and neighbors—it had been hard for them to believe at first, these people said. Not that they hadn’t read their history in school, hadn’t studied the various pillages and massacres, the Mongols, the Goths, the Turks, the Huns, but all that had been done with passion, in the heat of battle, and weren’t the conquered people enslaved afterwards and at least given a chance to live? The women and children?

“But this—”

“It’s over,” he tried to soothe them, and they agreed, yes, it was over, and they had lived instead of died for one reason or another, all of them, each one with a different twist to the tale. One could sew and got on a work detail, one knew the girl who ladled out the soup and got a little extra to eat, one was a gymnast and strong enough to walk through her typhoid fever. One could draw, but her sister could draw better and they sent her to the gas anyway, along with her mother, her father, her brothers, all their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, along with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and what they seemed to be asking that evening was less how to get on with their lives than why.

WHICH WAS RATHER A PROBLEM for Lieutenant Smith too, the camp commander, who invited her uncle to stay with him in his beautiful house that night. It was built in “a circular manner,” and had previously served as the Nazi headmaster’s quarters. The Nazi books were still on the shelves—Mein Kampf, SS Women. Before that it had apparently belonged to a rich, cultured family who had vanished into the camps with no trace. Her uncle sat with Lieutenant Smith in the library, “a fire burning in the fireplace, everything serene and really nice. The house is just above Lake Wurm, and of course the Bavarian country is, and I say unfortunately for such a bestial people, heavenly.

“We spoke of many things, the lieutenant’s troubles, both short term—getting more food—and long term—what to do with the inmates. Many of these people 

have no places to return to, and no reason to, either. He’s hoping that Palestine will be open to them.

“Also, the next day, he was sending back to Romania about eight hundred people”—

What? To survive Auschwitz and then end up in the Romania heading straight for Ceausescu, and the worst police state in what would soon be the Communist bloc? Hardly seemed fair.

And why Romania? Because it would take them?

But maybe why not Romania if you’d been through the camps. Everyone was dead, everyone. If you spoke Romanian, knew the streets, knew the black hearts of your fellows there as well as anywhere, maybe the idea was why bother with anywhere else?

Still, What about Brazil? she almost said out loud.

But Stefan Zweig had fled to Brazil and taken poison in despair, so who knew? Certainly not her uncle and Lieutenant Smith in June of 1945, as they sat smoking and speculating in front of the fire that night, concluding that Palestine was the most expedient solution; an easy gift of some scrub acres in the Middle East—what was it called then? Arabia?

And looking back on that too, one could see that if, instead, they’d bought them all, every one of those survivors of the death camps, lovely old mansions in Oyster Bay, or beach houses in Malibu, with full-time maid service and regular junkets to, say, Monte Carlo, all expenses paid, it would have been cheap at the price compared to the cost of “Palestine.”

But what concerned her uncle that night was less the fate of nations than how to get over to the sanitarium called St. Ottilien in the morning; and he wrote that he was greatly relieved when, after a few more cups of the Nazis’ very good brandy, Lieutenant Smith offered to requisition him a car.

THE CAR TURNED OUT TO BE a small truck, painted white with a huge red cross, complete with a corporal as driver. St. Ottilien had been a monastery, founded in an old castle, with the white walls and red roofs of this Bavarian countryside, so begrudged its “beastly” inhabitants by her uncle. It was “suppressed,” say the histories, whatever that means, “by the Gestapo,” but reopened in 1945 to care for former death camp prisoners, informally at first.

So informally that, when her uncle rode up in the white truck with the red cross, they greeted him with relief and flowers, thinking that finally an American soldier had come to run the place. When he finally clarified his mission—that he’d come looking for some cousins—one of the nuns looked more closely at his face.

“Yes, of course, you look exactly like her,” she said.

ike whom? he asked. He didn’t know these girls